Why a coach? You'll probably have an easier time finding a hire or someone outside to help. There's no shame in bringing on skills in another person instead of building them in yourself. If a venture backed startup founder told you that they've lost tens of thousands in revenue from server downtime, would you recommend that they hire a coach and learn it themselves? It would likely be cheaper, faster and more effective to get an outside IT service provider, and at some point it would make sense to build a team internally. Maintaining a competitive skill set is tough enough in one discipline. There is a big opportunity cost to trying to chase two.

Obviously that wouldn't hurt, and there are likely benefits to doing so. The thing to consider is will doing this save you time and make you a better leader or will it take time away from leading, growing and building a vision for the company? Only you can answer that. Being in a technical industry myself there is no way that I can know as much as my team knows. They are the ones in the trenches and understand the details better than I ever could. But I still need to have an overall grasp and understanding of how each of their roles applies to the projects and coordinate how they work together to get the job done. I could spend more time digging into the details, but ultimately that would take my time away from leading the company.

Message the expert directly and make the request. Many of us are available pre-call to address this kind of issue. If they're pressed for time, they'll let you know and you can reschedule the call. Otherwise, they'll just keep on the call until you've answered all your questions. The calls do not get cut off if they go over the accepted timeframe.

Clarity is a great platform for people to connect with Experts. If you feel that you'd be able to offer expert opinion, or can add valuable insight to someone seeking information, become an expert here.

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Social media is probably the best channel available, with reasonable returns. However, "free" may be a false economy, as it takes a lot of time/effort to do it effectively. Pick 1 or 2 relevant social media platforms (Twitter & Facebook?) and put your effort there. A lot depends on who your target market is, and what level of reach you need. E.g., if you need to a very specific set of users/customers, then make a list of your targets and try and reach out to the individuals on social media. If you have a wider set of users/customers, reach out to specific hashtags/keywords. Alternatively, put some money towards Google AdWords, LinkedIn ads or Facebook ads. Go for the "long tail" of keywords, which should be fairly cheap. Let me know if you need more detail around this.

You're definitely going the wrong direction. That's my opinion. But I'm right, and here's why: Your domain strategy is hyper-extended. You've got 4 domains in .CO.UK – hopefully 8 counting .UK rights. That's all well and good for a British audience. But you deliver work online; so why not appeal to a global audience? Here in the USA, ccTLDs (a.k.a. country codes) are not recognized. Your business will look strange and be misremembered as .COM. That means your marketing will be inefficient; you'll leak traffic to Google, parked PPC pages, or even competitors who develop sites with the same brand name(s) in the same niche! Meanwhile you'll pay extra in ongoing advertising costs to compensate. And you don't own the 4 corresponding .COM domains. I checked. They're owned by a pair of people / companies – both known to me already. To acquire these 4 matching domains, you'd need to spend about $10,000. That's based on the typical list prices these guys set, which you can verify, I'm sure. On top of this, you'd face brand protection issues for at least 4 distinct names. That obligates you to further domain purchases or risks ... in proportion to the number of brand names you're attempting to operate. After all, WantApp is confusingly similar to WantApps; and WantWebsite resembles WantAWebsite. And let's not forget .DESIGN and .WEBSITE, which means your WantDesign.co.uk is competing against both WantDesign.com and Want.Design, while your WantWebsite.co.uk has to shout extra-loud to be heard above WantWebsite.com and Want.Website. Things get complicated fast! You'd eventually face competitors with these names unless you bought them all. You might even get embroiled in trademark disputes, which are no fun. For that amount of money ($10k upwards), you can buy a really great domain name and consolidate all your efforts on a single brand name with worldwide appeal and a single website. In the long run, going the way you're going, you will pay thousands of pounds one way or another. Maybe you won't buy those other domains, but you will put extra cash, sweat, and time into marketing. You'd probably lose a few customers over the years as well, since they'd go somewhere other than your site and find other people to hire. I also have concerns about branding with multiple domains, managing multiple websites, or asking customers to bounce around between several sites. But there's no space to go into that. The domain issues already sank your battleship, I'm afraid. If you'd like help selecting a single unified brand name for all your services – which is what I recommend – let's talk. Naming and domain procurement are both areas I specialize in.

Hmm. We'd have to see how you're emails are worded. They might feel extremely spammy. I'd reach out to Donnie Cooper on here. He's an expert in email drip campaigns.

Hello -- I've hired and grown both field sales representatives and inside reps for the last decade. I think the answer to this question depends on how your deals are currently won. If your deals are currently won over screen share or phone, it makes sense to hire the person on the west coast, and have them work directly in your office. Monitoring activity and understanding how deals move through the funnel, and fall out of the funnel will be easier when someone is in-house. If your deals require that you visit the customer in person, then I'd advocate for hiring them wherever your customer base is located. It seems to me like at 40k, this is an opportunity for an in-office hire. I'm happy to jump on a call to discuss in more detail.

Planning software projects — especially estimating timelines — is a consistent challenge for developers. When I ran an agency, I constantly struggled with my team's ability to hit deadlines until I figured out how to plan more effectively. I've written up my approach here: http://lengstorf.com/effective-project-planning/ The short version is: 1. Make every task a yes/no question. If there's room for interpretation, it's not clear enough. 2. Keep the goals visible and track progress in a central location (somewhere you can both see). 3. Break tasks into single-day efforts whenever possible. So instead of "build home page", it's "A) style navigation; B) create opt-in; C) add testimonials section; etc." — the goal is to create momentum with a daily deadline that can absolutely be completed. It takes a little more effort up front, but it pays dividends in the long run. I used this strategy with my team to decrease our average turnaround times by nearly half, and my consulting clients have used this strategy to similar effect. I'd be happy to help you create a concrete plan using these techniques. Schedule a call or send me a message and we'll get started. Good luck!

Two key issues in your question: (1) when you say "majority are making millions" you're not seeing the hundreds of startups that failed in the same space... (2) if it's such a great idea, you should have traction. CHALLENGE: Adding photos to menus is tricky... Good pics are very expensive, and bad pics will detract from a menu's appeal. I could let a restaurant owner fax me a menu and get it online for around $2 using offshore labor for data entry. But a good photo shoot would cost hundreds or more and require local talent everywhere (or place a large and expensive burden on the restaurant owners). It's also labor-intensive to get thousands of restaurants signed on to something. Are you planning to scrape other sites and spam restaurant owners? Walk door-to-door? Buy a mailing list? If you've been personally soliciting restaurants, that's useful for market research - but obviously can't ever be profitable. You should test a scalable strategy for acquisition. Remember, a menu service that has only 30% (or even 60%) of the restaurants in my neighborhood is pretty much useless. Can you acquire them all, cheaply? Do they even want photos of their food? Only restaurants like McDonald's, Cheesecake Factory, and Chinese take-out do that these days. To earn investment dollars, you'll need to prove: (a) you can execute this concept at scale, on boarding hundreds of restaurants, (b) restaurant owners are signing up, and (c) you're able to gain sufficient traffic to the site for the business to generate ongoing value. RECOMMENDATION: prove yourself in one city, and investors may help you to expand to many. But if you want funding to pay for initial marketing / webdev / photography while you "gain traction", then that would be a wasted effort. Investors need to see scalable proof, and since fund-raising is time-consuming, better to invest your own energy in proving the business first.

I think you have to go with your gut on this one. We've worked with clients to coordinate the use of telemarketing services through UpWork and have had a good experience. But we stuck with native-English speaking freelancers. Most on them were from the US. When they call, ask them to not only explain the service, but also ask them to request an email address where they can send more information. Give the telemarketer a company email address and a pre-set message about your service to email. Or you can do this yourself. If you're simply trying to raise awareness, a phone call is no big deal and would be great. If you're trying to sell, it will be a little tough, and it might be better to simply have them setup a time for you to return the call and close the sale. Whenever you're having to talk and explain a service over the phone, it's important to have a firm grasp on the language and vernacular phrases. Look into some of the telemarketers from outside the US who list themselves as expert English speakers and setup a time to talk with them over the phone to gauge their phone skills and grasp of the language.

I think I get where you are going with this. Your company buys products/merchandise from people looking to sell that merchandise. Example: Amy has a printer and she is looking to sell her printer. She does not know where to sell her printer so she Google's, "Where can I sell a printer" and you want your landing page to surface specifically for that product. This is an excellent growth tactic and one that can be extremely effective. First, I would start by creating a general template for this set of pages including everything except that which would be specific to a specific category. Then I would go down a level and think about how you could speak specifically to each category. Example: Instead of saying something general like, "XYZMarketplace has bought 100,000 products this year" I would be targeted on exactly what they originally searched for. So this could be along the lines of, "XYZMarketplace has bought over 1,000 printers this month" or "Sell Your Printer in 5 Minutes". This talks directly to what they are searching for. Often times companies stop there and after a user clicks your CTA (call to action) the user is pushed into the standard onboarding flow. This often leads to a higher drop-off rates during onboarding. I would suggest that you customize your onboarding flow for that specific category. Example: The user that was searching for, "Where can I sell a printer" and landed on your printer landing page liked what you were offering and clicked the CTA of "Sell My Printer Today". Now you may have an onboarding workflow that says, "We are thrilled that you decided to sell your printer on XYZ. What type of printer do you have?" Then use icons and images, to take them through the decision tree. This does take more work than having just one generalized onboarding process, but it will greatly increase your conversions. The tools I would use to do this is a combination between Unbounce and Optimizely. They both are going to be hugely beneficial. If you are looking for a free alternative, I would suggest Google's little-known option called Google Experiments. This will get you started, however, based on what you are looking for it may not be powerful enough to effectively manage the number of A/B tests and landing pages you would be doing. In regards to spam, it is highly unlikely your pages will be marked as spam as long as your pages contents are considerably different. If you duplicate the product specific landing pages and only replace the instance of the product then you are running a significant risk. If you actually speak to the differences beyond the product name you will not have this problem. I would love to chat with you further about this. Here is my Clarity.fm VIP link for a free call. https://clarity.fm/lipmanb/vip/t

Their phone system works really and simply delivers what is expected. I think having an availability time calendar would be very beneficial so that scheduling matches our availability. Being able to record calls and charge clients an additional fee for that would be great. Also, screen sharing would be good too.

In short yes. In medium term, depends. In your case probably not. Most investors look for viable options that show that you can get real cheap production/sourcing of goods or services offered, actual market reach to capitalize on goods (example could be a stack of POs or preorders, or substantial email requests) and skillful team in place to pull it together. Im an MBA business coach and entrepreneur, I've also invested in a similar startup like the one you mentioned and they failed 2 years into it. Hey lacked one of the 3 I mentioned and just as a bar stool with 3 legs, you need all 3 to have a sustainable business. Savvy investors look for this... They look for your sounded and balanced approach, realistic forecasts, actionable plans, actions to date, financials, team and your leadership... But none the less i think all investors are also driven by their emotions- how good of a pitch man are you? How can you connect them to your product idea? Etc.. Etc... As you can see the more you dig into getting investors but depending on how you present the 3, to the right investor for your idea, the idea might be enough to give you a try. I would suggest to not waste your time pitching and burning bridges until you have a prototype, but I wont! I will instead tell you to go research your area, pitch your idea to valuable people who could help you implement something rough, create a landing page to capture emails, create social accounts and promote the idea there, it's values, etc. garner a community... Then once you have a community of supporters of your "what if" go get yourself a Kickstarter campaign going... And promote it through your community. Ask for support... Get some funding.. Then if that's not enough.. Go look for relevant business individuals who would be interested and could invest. Convince by showing off your community size, campaign support, effort, and your drive to do and maybe then you can get investors without an actual product. :) #unthink

I've done fundraising for two of my own startups, and advised 4 others. The only answer to this question is "now." As soon as you think you have product market fit, you should be getting in touch with seed investors. It takes time for these relationships to develop; and in the startup world, time is always running out. Your pitch may fluctuate and adjust while you're out there shaking hands and building presentations. But don't let that uncertainty stop you from meeting people. You may be tempted to try and perfect your pitch before you start talking to potential investors. But nothing polishes a pitch like repeated failure and feedback. So I'd recommend starting the process as soon as you have a firm enough concept to describe it in a meaningful way. Also, it's important to distinguish the start of a funding "campaign" and the beginning of a "round." Meeting with investors (the campaign) should be continuous activity until you exit. Once you secure your seed round, you immediately go into series A mode, and so on. The reason being that each funding round has longer and longer lead times. Each relationship gets more and more difficult to obtain. Actually issuing shares or convertible debt (the round) should , in most cases, begin only when you have lined up more investors that have said yes than you need to complete the round. Put another way, start collecting checks when you have more commitments to than you need to reach your funding goal. That way, you can use your momentum of receiving funds to motivate investors that are on the fence. The best case scenario is that you oversubscribe your round. But the moral of the story is starting campaigning for investors yesterday. It always takes longer than you want. So the sooner you start, the sooner you get funded.

This is actually kind of a funny question to answer on Clarity. Not sure if you're aware, but we (Startups.co) actually own Clarity, Launchrock, and of course, Zirtual! Zirtual has an amazing product and great people. The company ran into problems around how it managed utilization of folks, which is common among highly staffed businesses. There wasn't anything "broken" with Zirtual as a business, which is why we acquired it. It's a great company, just like Clarity which we also purchased this year. If you have particular questions about the level of service or the company behind it, you can simply ask me directly - wil@startups.co. I can give you any kind of insight that you'd like. But don't worry about the service - we have great people and we're a happy, profitable, growing company.

There are many companies that offer these services as a do it for you. I would recommend you look at a local business vs the services that are offered on line. I am in the LA area and just set up a corporation using the local resource. If they are legit, they will all charge within the same price range. I would look into the LLC vs a CCorp. If you wish to do it yourself, the forms and procedures can be found on the State of California's website. Nothing too complicated, but the process is time consuming.

We have built a product on Twilio that we sell to doctors offices. To my knowledge, what you're asking for is not possible as-is. What you could do though: When someone calls, have the system text message you "Hey, this number called, click here to call them back" ... and the "click here" is a URL that hits your server and initiates the call from your server, creates a call conference, and then drops you and the person you're calling back into the call conference.

For a successful crowdfunding campaign we need two or three things to work - you must express the campaign as a mission and cause, this mission must be one that your team believes in, and hopefully some or all of the team has some experience (personal or professional) that not only prepares them for success but emotionally makes them hungry for that success. So the types of questions you could ask include "why does this research matter?" "How would you feel if the project succeeds?" and "how would you feel if the project fails?". I'd be happy to list your questions in a chat and more importantly to discuss how to make their answers matter to your donors - how they can tell a story! Warmly, Arjun

After looking at your site, I definitely belive that you have something that is extremely valuable and can definitely be popular in tech communities. Yes, your copy needs to be more focused. What is it? I would have a landing page (or a cover page) that makes it really simple for a visitor to understand what it is and why this will help them. Include an email field and offer a free eBook. I would highly suggest that you use Optimizely or Unbounce to A/B test your copy and call to actions. (Side Note: Keep in mind how much traffic you have when calculating test significance) Since you are focusing on a developers/engineers, I would reach out to 10 of your most passionate fans that have contributed or have shared your GitHub repo. Ask them if they would be willing to contribute to the site sharing their thoughts. The more influential these people are the better. Instead of assuming they have a login ask them to create an account right on that page. Also, include Twitter login. One point I would make regarding SEO: Include the name of the articles in the URL of the comment pages. This helps with sharing and rankings on SEO. Use Twitter as a growth engine and tweet out all the latest posts that you are curating to your sites Twitter account. Then if you have an active twitter following start engaging fellow engineers asking them questions about these posts. This heightens engagement and starts getting your audience engaged (some of which will convert). To take this one step further find the author of the posts you are sharing and mention them in the post saying that their article has been curated on your site (better yet you could say their article is being discussed on your site). The author will be inclined to retweet and share their post with their following. Have some variability in using this tactic, variability makes it more valuable. Use SumoMe as a really simple way to add email capture popups on the site. In regards to strategy, you may find it more sustainable to use the closed/invite only model for commenting like Product Hunt used. This creates a higher perceived value for those that access to commenting which in turn increases engagement. This strategy would go nicely with the initial outreach I mentioned above. I hope this helps. I would love to chat further here is my Clarity VIP link for a free call. https://clarity.fm/lipmanb/vip/t

There is an old phrase "you get what you pay for." If your app is simple and you expect someone >20 hours to complete this app, then yes, you can find a dev to do build this app. But it's more than likely that your application will take some effort, if you need guidance, give me a call. I know developers and can give you a basic estimate on how much your app will cost to develop.

https://dev.twitter.com/overview/documentation Everything you'll need (or whoever your programmer is) will likely be contained in the above link. Now, to answer your questions: 1) yes there is a Twitter API that can be accessed; 2) the API for Twitter does allow users to post tweets directly from their own account in a different app. Hope that helps!

Well this totally depends what your MVP is? What's the functionality? I'd suggest something like http://www.squarespace.com/ our designers with very little technical knowledge have had great success with this. Another option if it's just for demos/feedback is to use something like http://www.invisionapp.com/ for rapid prototyping.

There are few online tools which allows you to analyze competitor ad space. I would suggest 2 tools SEMrush.com and Adgooroo.com.Both tools will provide very specific information about their organic search, paid search, backlinks, display advertising, top keywords, and main competitors. There are various way you can promote with small budget but again it depends on various factors which depend on what you want to get out of it. If you are looking to increase your brand awareness than a quick solution is to have display ads on Facebook and Adwords with targeted segment. If you are interested in discussing more about it than feel free to book for a call to have more personalized solution.